Aruma Balakrishnan Padmajakshan
I strive to turn vision into measurable impact, managing the full programme cycle from design and operations to partnership development, budget oversight, and monitoring and evaluation. My work encompasses the development of handloom and handicraft clusters, agri-clusters, market linkage and retail, nano-enterprise development programmes, community welfare initiatives, and child education programmes. I combine strategic programme thinking with strong stakeholder engagement to build trust and drive measurable, sustainable outcomes.
"Make the Gains Last"
As Program Manager at Prachodhan Development Services, part of the ESAF Group of social enterprises, I worked across agriculture, education, and community development in Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Assam, Jharkhand, and Kerala. That spread taught me two things the hard way: how much clarity a message needs to actually land across that many contexts, and why a monitoring system has to be built around outcomes, not just outputs, or it tells you nothing useful.
Alongside that, I sat on a four-person advisory team for a retail brand built to celebrate the natural fibres, culture, and creativity of Indian handloom and handicraft artisans for a conscious-consumer audience. My piece of it was the market research that defined which products and categories we sourced from artisans and weavers. I also led the purchase and partnerships team, and guided the marketing team on the video production and photography that helped bring the project to life.
Through ESAF Small Finance Bank's CSR initiatives, I got close to its women-centred Self-Help Group ecosystem, farmers, and children, focused on capacity building and education. I wasn't in the microfinance operations myself, but I sat with beneficiaries and saw first-hand what that access changes in a household. Separately, I worked on a project proposal for a World Bank-funded initiative with the Government of Assam to expand financial inclusion for farmers and weavers.
Across all of it, the actual job has been the same: build the programme, keep it monitored and honestly reported against its own outcomes, and hold up my end with the board and with funders. Four years of CSR implementation gave me the empathy to see a project from the community's side, and the persistence to stay at the table with external stakeholders, including senior government officials, until it's actually delivered. And before any of this, a year at BYJU'S as a product development associate gave me a grounding in the startup world and in building content people actually use, a skill that came back around when I ended up guiding the content design for Prachodhan's after-school programme for children.
The throughline across my career hasn't changed: build the programme, find the improvements, and make sure what it earns outlasts the project. That's the work I'm looking to keep doing.
Theme One
Livelihoods — building producer enterprises and the market capacity that sustains them.
Theme Two
Education & child development, from informal roots to a measured, scalable programme.
Building Producer Enterprises
Handloom, handicraft, and farm-adjacent producer collectives
India's handloom sector is the country's second-largest source of rural employment: 4.4 million livelihoods, 70% of them women. Yet a market assessment I worked on found handloom is still bought almost as a festive-occasion category — 38% of consumers said they buy handloom specifically in the festive season. Designing the selling calendar around that fact, rather than around a retail default, is the difference between a craft that survives and one that doesn't.
A producer enterprise that runs successfully through commerce reinvests its proceeds into the community for growth and sustainability: a cycle where a producer is organised, a product is made, a market is found to buy it, revenue comes back, and a share of that revenue is reinvested into the community for the benefit of the next generation of producers.
Most people who work in an organisation built this way have worked on one segment of that loop, usually the producer-enterprise side or the programme side. I have worked on two of its far ends.
Every cluster I've worked on, be it the Kolhapuri leather artisans, the Aari embroiderers, the handloom weavers of Devangapuram and Kuthampully, or the agriculture-based producer clusters, was organised following UNIDO's Inclusive and Sustainable Cluster Development approach:
- Cluster selection — confirming a genuine, existing concentration of producers, not one assembled for a project.
- Diagnostic study — a participatory study of the cluster's strengths, gaps, and constraints: a household survey and value-chain mapping across a representative sample of households and weavers.
- Vision-building and action planning — a development strategy the cluster itself signs onto, built from what the diagnostic actually found.
- Governance — the institutional structure that lets the cluster act collectively: a producer company, an OFPO (Off-Farm Producer Organisation) or FPO (Farm Producer Organisation), or a cooperative.
- Implementation — joint action and the market linkages the plan calls for.
- Monitoring and evaluation — tracking the cluster's own performance against the baseline the diagnostic study set.
Beyond the standard producer-company structure, I proposed a weaver-entrepreneur model for Devangapuram: moving weavers from wage-earners dependent on middlemen to entrepreneurs who own their own production, design, and market relationships. The collective was designed to function as a knowledge centre, incubating weaver-run micro-enterprises through Weaver's Interest Groups, design co-creation, and market-linkage support, loosely modelled on the Handloom School pioneered by Women Weave. The goal wasn't just a functioning cooperative, but a cadre of weavers who see entrepreneurship as the route to a sustainable livelihood, not just collective bargaining.
Turning a GI-Tagged Craft Into a Producer-Owned Business
Madabhavi is home to a cluster of 900+ families making Kolhapuri chappals. This was the first of the four diagnostic studies I designed and completed, and it's still the project closest to my heart. The project was built for Deshpande Foundation, for submission to NABARD, a government agency.
Kolhapuri Chappal already holds a Geographical Indication (GI No. 169, registered 2009, Class 25 – Footwear), a legal recognition as an authentic regional craft. The artisans making it were capturing almost none of that value: production scattered across individual homes with no shared quality standard, raw material and credit sourced on poor terms, no collective bargaining power, and no route to market beyond local retail and exhibitions.
I ran the 283-household diagnostic survey mapping turnover, raw-material sourcing, credit access, and skill levels across the cluster, and paired it with a consumer survey so the business case was built on actual demand and pricing data. I designed the OFPO structure, targeting 200 artisan-members around a hub-and-spoke Common Facility Centre: a shared machinery and centralised-quality-control hub, with decentralised home-based activity as the "spokes." I standardised four product tiers, from basic to export and luxury, with costed, transparent margins so artisans capture a fair share instead of an ad hoc one. I built the financing case, a ₹13.7 million project structured as 75% NABARD, 15% Deshpande Foundation, and 10% community contribution, so artisans co-invest rather than simply receive a grant. "The Kolhapur Co." was proposed as the market-facing brand to carry the GI-recognised product into retail and institutional channels.
The OFPO was formally registered in January 2021, the Common Facility Centre was built, and production began. It went on to onboard 400 artisan members. The market brand proposed in the DPR, "The Kolhapur Co.," was launched and later merged with a production brand, and now operates in the creative manufacturing space.
Reviving a 1947 Weavers' Cooperative
The Devangapuram weavers' cooperative was registered in December 1947, a producer-owned society older than most of the institutions now trying to revive it. By the time I was engaged to write its Detailed Project Report for NABARD, the society was functionally dysfunctional, and its weavers were surviving as job-work labour.
- Around 75% of the surveyed weaver households fall below the poverty line, now dependent on job-givers for their source of income.
- Design is supplied to them: weavers have no independent access to design or colour-theory input, and no path to originate their own products.
- No route to market that isn't mediated by middlemen, so no pricing power and no brand identity of their own.
- Younger weavers are not entering the craft; without a viable livelihood case, the skill risks dying with the current generation.
- Ran the primary household survey and value-chain mapping across the cluster, then the SWOT and need-gap analysis that anchors the report's diagnosis.
- Designed the four-pillar intervention: financial (grants, working capital, and a reserve fund), workforce (skilling and outreach to first-generation weavers), marketing (a producer-owned marketing system across the right channel mix), and design (professional design support built around co-creation, not replacement, of artisan knowledge).
- Structured the case for converting the dysfunctional cooperative into a formal Off-Farm Producer Organisation, with the governance model and NABARD-facing project cost and financing plan.
"Kaitharikkoru Kaithangu" — A Marketing Campaign to Promote Handlooms
Cedar Retail's GoNature brand sources fibre-based products (jute, bamboo, water hyacinth) to route income to producers at the base of the economy. In 2022, that model was extended to traditional textiles through a pilot campaign: handloom sarees and fabrics procured from five separate weaver clusters.
Building the supply side alone doesn't solve the issues artisans face. The demand side has to be built too: someone has to make the case for why a customer pays more for it, and open channels that reach that customer. The supply side and the demand side reinforce each other.
- Co-designed "Kaitharikkoru Kaithangu," a dedicated campaign to promote handlooms and build customer awareness, and led the campaign's video production and photo shoots. The campaign ran for three seasons during the local Onam festival. (Campaign video: youtu.be/zHLbNPyRS_M)
- Coordinated cross-functionally to give the weavers awareness, mentoring support, and improved market access, aimed at sustained work and decent earnings. Built four sales channels within a short span: a direct website, social-media commerce, institutional sales, and spot events, rather than relying on a single retail relationship.
- Built the positioning and go-to-market case that followed the pilot: GoNature Origins as "Conscious, Crafted, Collectible," aimed at the urban, financially independent customer who buys handmade products for their authenticity, craft, and beauty.
The multi-channel pilot performed well enough, internally, to justify the next step: a business case and store concept for a permanent retail outlet. GoNature's retail arm has since opened Gonature Origins, a dedicated showroom carrying handwoven sarees and home furnishings built on the same sourcing model.
The Model Applied Beyond Handloom
Aari Embroidery OFPO
Detailed Project Report organising 100+ women Aari embroidery artisans into a formal Off-Farm Producer Organisation — value-chain mapping and market-demand analysis underpinning the case for formal production, quality, and marketing systems.
Horticulture Value-Chain — Women Agri-Entrepreneurs
Proposal to build a dehydration-technology horticulture supply chain (banana "sukeli," mango, jackfruit) with 30 women producers, structured under the Foundation's Micro-Entrepreneurship Development Programme: capacity building, technical assistance, and market linkage in one design.
Xamahar Assam Agrifin Challenge Fund
Business plan for a financial-inclusion project bringing savings, credit, insurance, and payments to smallholder farmers, built on Krushakmitra & Pashumitra livelihood models and FPO/FIG lending, inside a bank network of 560 outlets serving 5.5 million+ customers.
Education & Child Development
After-school life-skills capability building, and school-quality strengthening
Income alone buys a family one generation of change. What carries it into the next is whether their children get an education that actually opens more doors. At Prachodhan Development Services, this pillar runs on two tracks that reinforce each other: formal schools, for the places with no functioning alternative, and Balajyothi, after-school life-skills clubs, for reaching many more children without the cost of running a school for each of them.
Schools
Community-built schools in hard-to-reach geographies: Jharkhand's interior and Majuli, a river island in Assam reachable only by boat, providing quality classroom infrastructure where none existed.
Balajyothi
After-school clubs delivering financial literacy, arts & sports, academic support, and character & career guidance, reaching children a school-building model alone could never scale to.
From an Informal "Kids for Kids" Campaign to 7,000+ Children
The programme was already running at Prachodhan Development Services when I joined. It began as an informal response to children in interior Jharkhand selling mahua liquor instead of attending school, funded initially by donations from children in Kerala. As it took organic shape and grew, it secured CSR funding, and has since grown into 7 community schools, 3 high schools, and 2 lower-primary schools across Jharkhand and Assam, plus Balajyothi after-school clubs now running in six states, reaching 5,000+ children across Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, and Assam, over half of them girls, and 2,000+ children in formal schooling in Jharkhand and Assam, most from tribal communities (Santhal, Mising).
Balajyothi ran as a network of after-school clubs, but what happened inside any one of them depended entirely on whichever volunteer was leading it. There was no shared curriculum, no link to a developmental framework, and no way to know whether a child in one state's club was getting the same grounding as a child in another's.
I ran a baseline study across Balajyothi clubs in every state to see what was actually happening on the ground, club by club. Working with specialists, I then designed a structured curriculum linking each club's activities to a 21st-century-skills framework, so a child's development no longer depended on which volunteer showed up. To make it scale without me in the room, I built a training-of-trainers structure: club coordinators were trained directly, and they in turn trained the volunteers running each individual club.
What changed through this exercise was the volunteers themselves: they gained new skills and ongoing guidance alongside the children. That meant a club's activities were now structured and focused by design, not dependent on whichever skills an individual volunteer happened to bring. A year after the curriculum went live, both regular attendance and learning outputs at club activities were up 20% over baseline, a first, concrete signal that a structured, skills-linked programme serves a child's development better than leaving it to a volunteer's discretion and skill alone.
Programme development and execution
Needs assessment and design through implementation, monitoring and impact reporting.
Partnership building
Coordinating government, NGO, financial-sector, foundations, and technical stakeholders around shared outcomes.
Resource mobilisation
Proposal development, funding pitches, and institutional partnerships, including from multilateral sources.
A grounded social-impact lens
Hands-on work with children, farmers, women entrepreneurs, artisans, and migrant workers.